The UAW and CAW Confront Lean Production at Saturn, CAMI, and the Japanese Automobile Transplants

The North American auto marketplace witnessed a major restructuring during the 1980s. This article examines UAW\u27s and CAW\u27s quite different and distinctive responses to these developments at two union plants: the UAW\u27s and GM\u27s joint operation of the Saturn plant and the CAW\u27s adversarial shop floor labor-management relations at CAMI, a GM-Suzuki joint venture. Then the article focuses on the common challenges both unions have to overcome in organizing Hyundai, the South Korean automaker, and the six Japanese plants. The article closes by exploring the risks and opportunities both unions face from the North American Free Trade Agreement

Macroalgae Decrease Growth and Alter Microbial Community Structure of the Reef-Building Coral, Porites astreoides

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Public Library of Science and can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/home.action.With the continued and unprecedented decline of coral reefs worldwide, evaluating the factors that contribute to coral demise is of critical importance. As coral cover declines, macroalgae are becoming more common on tropical reefs. Interactions between these macroalgae and corals may alter the coral microbiome, which is thought to play an important role in colony health and survival. Together, such changes in benthic macroalgae and in the coral microbiome may result in a feedback mechanism that contributes to additional coral cover loss. To determine if macroalgae alter the coral microbiome, we conducted a field-based experiment in which the coral Porites astreoides was placed in competition with five species of macroalgae. Macroalgal contact increased variance in the coral-associated microbial community, and two algal species significantly altered microbial community composition. All macroalgae caused the disappearance of a γ-proteobacterium previously hypothesized to be an important mutualist of P. astreoides. Macroalgal contact also triggered: 1) increases or 2) decreases in microbial taxa already present in corals, 3) establishment of new taxa to the coral microbiome, and 4) vectoring and growth of microbial taxa from the macroalgae to the coral. Furthermore, macroalgal competition decreased coral growth rates by an average of 36.8%. Overall, this study found that competition between corals and certain species of macroalgae leads to an altered coral microbiome, providing a potential mechanism by which macroalgae-coral interactions reduce coral health and lead to coral loss on impacted reefs

Computational methods for association studies utilizing free-text and spoken plant phenotype descriptions

Recording observations for plant traits is a time-consuming and costly process called phenotyping. These observations of the phenotypes of plant traits are valuable for improving crops by identifying genetic regions of interest identified through association studies. Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) require genotypic marker information across all of the chromosomes for members of a population and phenotypic data that characterizes a trait. Improvements in genotyping technologies and the encouragement of data sharing have made genotypic datasets for maize populations accessible. Concurrently, high-throughput phenotyping methods are being developed to improve data collection and involve expensive automated machinery and sensors to collect measurement and scoring data. Natural language descriptions of plants contain a wealth of underutilized phenotypic information. Recent research efforts use structured descriptions of data that apply ontologies, which are structured data that represent relatedness to other terms and ease the computational burden of determining semantic similarity or word meaning similarity. Comparative analysis of gene interaction demonstrated the utility of structured language descriptions of plant phenotypes. Methods to automate the development of structured descriptions of plants indicate that humans who curate these data may use new computational methods to generate such terms. Additionally, computational pre-trained natural language models enable computing on free-text (i.e., unstructured data) to categorize and predict gene interactions. New methods for generating and analyzing plant descriptions are pertinent because of the success of extracting biologically meaningful information from free-text descriptions of plant phenotypes. This work culminates in developing processes to collect, process, and analyze spoken language descriptions of plants recorded in a field environment. Descriptions of the accessions in the Wisconsin Diversity panel are used to perform GWAS to identify regions of interest of the genome associated with the plant height trait

Canadian Recruitment of East Asian Automobile Transplants: Cultural, Economic, and Political Perspectives

This article probes the historical and cultural roots of Canadian federal and provincial economic development strategies and the politics of Canadian foreign direct investment. Then it focuses upon the impetus for Canada\u27s intense interest in East Asian automobile transplant recruitment, the political and economic dynamics behind the recruitment of three Japanese transplants and one South Korean transplant to Ontario and Quebec, the extent to which this foreign investment experience is continuous with the United States\u27 long-term hegemony in the Canadian automobile marketplace, and the genuine and superficial differences between the Canadian and American Asian industrial recruitment experiences against their deeper con

Dreams of sustainability: beyond the antinomies of the global sustainability debate

Sustainable development joined the global vocabulary of the 1990s as a catchword or rallying cry at international conferences and other forums. This essay begins by clarifying two key terms - the "local" and the "global" - in the sustainability debate by examining the contested meaning and implications of the adage, "think globally, act locally". A critique of the deployment of those terms in the strategy of "green globalism" - a particular rendering of sustainable development put forth by major political power brokers and economic and financial stakeholders - follows. This critique serves as a springboard for a critical examination of the perils of environmental moralism expressed in Agenda 21 and other international sustainability declarations put forth in recent years. Recognising that the achievement of local sustainable development must be linked with demands of countries of the South for programmes of global economic redistribution, this analysis then develops a critique of the Brundtland Commission report as a prelude to a detailed critical analysis of the sustainable development policies of the World Bank's 1992 World Development Report. Finally, the paper attempts to surpass localist/globalist contradictions in the global sustainability debate by speculating on the promise and possibilities of a New International Economic Order (NIEO).Brundtland Commission; New International Economic Order; sustainable cities; World Bank.